The Medication Safety Programme aims to greatly reduce the number of New Zealanders harmed each year by medication errors in our hospitals, general practices, aged care facilities and across the entire health and disability sector.

Healthcare associated infection is one of the most frequent adverse events in health care worldwide. Up to 10 percent of patients admitted to modern hospitals in the developed world acquire one or more infections.

Health Quality & Safety Commission | Reportable Events

Reporting adverse events or incidents helps health services manage the risks of providing care. Incident management identifies problems and failures in the system so we can learn from them and prevent similar events from happening.

I might be showing my age by mentioning this iconic television programme of the mid-seventies when talking about patient experience survey results. I see the parallels between the two as opportunistic.

About 30 years ago I spent some years as a consultant psychiatrist working with people who were having treatment for cancer – that is in the oncology unit. These were the days when it was relatively new for psychiatrists to work as part of the health care team in other specialty areas, and not unexpectedly much of my role was in listening to, and talking with, people about what they wanted for themselves and their families in the time they had left.